Reviews by MathBrush

This was a game of big contrasts for me. There were parts of it that were phenomenal and parts I struggled with.

This is a story about a young girl alone at home whose father is outside, texting her to let him in. The problem is, though, that her father was in the study just a little while ago.

I loved the writing in this. Vivid and surreal images mixed together for a very creepy feel. It reminded me of some goosebumps stories when I was younger, like the one where the dad was a plant scientist.

I love horror and find this writing style to be very enjoyable, so I'd definitely like to see more games from this author.

This fantasy twine game is modeled on Shakespeare's language and style of writing, and deals with bandits in search of a temple with a hidden treasure.

The story has some fascinating elements of time travel and Pictish culture, of which I learned many new things (one I didn't fully learn was the other name for Picts, and so I haven't used it here as I've forgot it).

There are some interesting mechanics, such as a variable amount of gold that you can bribe someone with, with varying results. The styling looks quite nice.

I didn't feel completely drawn into the game, for whatever reason. Partially it might be because some of the language was off, like using 'thy' as a subject or the '-st' suffix for the third person tense. I enjoy Shakespeare quite a bit too, and I feel it could have been a little closer.

Overall, though, the game feels quite polished and I expect that I would enjoy further works by this author.

Out of the many wordplay games Andrew Schultz has made, the anagram ones are perhaps my favorites (along with Threediopolis). I feel like coming up with anagrams is hard enough to be fun but easy enough not to be overwhelming or send me to hints or online solvers right away.

This is a compact game, set on a circle (or torus) with 7 different locations. Each one is solvable through an anagram.

After that, there is a motion puzzle that is a little tricky to solve. What is going on, exactly? Well, it seems like they want you to (strong spoilers without an explicit solution) (Spoiler - click to show)visit every square of the torus, never moving more than half its length at once, and varying your steps somewhat.

It took me quite a while to figure out what was wanted here, as I kept finding solutions deemed 'too easy'.

Overall, I'd say this is a fairly challenging game, and definitely one not to miss for fans of the first two, longer games.

This is a one-room parser game with a lot of little and big gags in it. You are an insurance salesman waiting for a noble Baroness to arrive to sell insurance too.

In the meantime, though, several mishaps occur, each more ridiculous than the last.

Like others, I found the ending abrupt and thought there might be more. Decompiling the source code, I could find no solution to (Spoiler - click to show)the burning curtains, while at least one other reviewer found that reaching the part of the game with more points gave an alternate ending.

Our male character has a sexual fixation with the baroness, and it crops up enough that I personally found it annoying, as I don't associate such material with positive feelings.

Overall, the comedic timing was well-done, and outside of the ending I found the puzzles not too hard and also engaging.

This is an Adventuron game set in the plains of Manitoba. It involves research about local plants and wildlife and about Ukrainians who emigrated to Canada.

It also contains a jumpscare, so fair warning! Scared me quite a bit. Just the one scare, though.

Overall, it's a well-done horror story that is elevated by the obvious research and care into the background details. It has 10 different achievements, of which I found 8.

Overall:
*Polish: I didn't run into any parser problems, the art is well-done and the prose is smooth.
*Descriptiveness: A lot of vivid imagery and attention to detail.
*Interactivity: I liked the open-endedness of the achievements but also always had something to do.
*Emotional impact: Pretty scary, although 80% of it was the jumpscare.
*Would I play again? Yeah, I think I could.

This is a thoughtful game, a mostly-linear ghost story about a roommate that haunts the place and about relationships and our dealings with the others.

I liked the writing in this, it's really about turning an inner eye on ourselves and seeing the bad habits and unhealthy relationships that we have let become so natural that we can't even see them anymore.

It also has an interesting take on ghosts, similar to but slightly different from most representations I've seen in media.

This a a very well-written but overall unstrusctured short, linear twine story about a funeral home late at night, and a cat.

It cites influences like House of Leaves, and has a bilingual protagonist, with the game including vivid details of a Hispanic family's life and culture. The protagonist is relatable and there's some great scene-by-scene writing.

This setup gave me huge expectations, but the story ends with a very quick infodump and sudden ending with nothing but a 'start over' link. It felt like it was missing a third of it; the ending could have worked with more middle exposition, or it could have worked with a longer denouement, but I was left feeling unsatisfied. But I would love to read more by this author, as I love the style.

This is a weird game.

It's a unity-based visual novel with some video title cards, jazz music (or maybe ragtime?) and static cut-outs of animals.

You play as what I can only describe as a deeply disturbed squirrel, one out of touch both with the thoughts and emotions of others but also with physical reality itself.

While the game isn't super long (about 5 or 6 vignettes), each explores a dark facet of the human existence. It feels like the 'depressing half' of Anna Karenina (the one centered on Anna, as opposed to Kitty and Levin).

But in the end, even a narcissistic and untethered-to-reality squirrel deserves to live and has some human worth, and is perhaps deserving of love (although this goes against the squirrels own desires, so maybe not).

All in all, I didn't expect the pieces of this game to fall together for me the way they did, but I think I'll end up contemplating this for a while.

This is a game from the recent 'Running out of Ink' itch anthology.

In this Twine story, you play as a tired author who just moved out of her parents' house and is trying to write a story over 3 days. Your choices during each of the three days affects the resulting story, which you can read at the end.

A lot of it is very relatable; trying to manage your creative output by procrastinating through playing games (something I've been doing myself except with writing reviews), writing for the 'wrong outlet' (where you are verbose) instead of the 'right one' (where you get stuck). I especially related to listening to podcasts while playing grindy games (I can highly recommend mixing the Magnus Archives podcast with Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies).

The character is depicted clearly and the variable story at the end is neat (the code for it is basically a time cave, with three possible first pages, 9 second, 27 third, etc. approximately).

My only caveats are that the game could be tidier. Paragraphs run together; I'd rather see each new paragraph indented or a full line left between them, like the finished story at the end. And there were a couple of noticeable typos (like 'to' for 'two') that could be caught by using Twine's text dump feature and running the result through Grammarly.

Though just a demo, this a pleasant experience overall.

It uses a custom interface that is made with Moiki, a system I've never seen before but which seems like a smooth, stats-based hyperlink system with good graphics integration. My first impression is 'choicescript mechanics and Twine styling options', but I'm not sure how accurate that is.

Game-wise, I'm going to call it 'Bohemian' as it's focused heavily on wine, food, culture and literature. It has some darker undertones as well.

The stats at first felt like perhaps they weren't used very much, but as the game progressed I saw them more. It was a bit odd seeing some choices where you have to be good at a stat to use them, but your reward is just more of that stat (I swear I read an Emily Short post where she calls this 'rich get richer'). But the demo didn't last long enough to show the long game, so it's possible this won't be a problem in the long run.

My only other (small) complaint is that the text when gaining something special just flashes on the screen for a second, so I (a non-native speaker) couldn't finish reading it.

Otherwise, a good story, reminding me of an Edgar Allan Poe story adapted by someone who owns a vineyard.